Wheat is one of the most important cereal crops in the world. While it is currently being grown in a wide range of environments, the most prominent production of wheat occurs in the U.S.A., China, Australia, Canada, India and Europe.
Most of the wheat production is consumed as flour. Bread wheat accounts for about 80% of total consumption of wheat.
The development of an efficient transformation system is necessary for the molecular analysis of gene expression in plants. In cereal crop plants, this development has been slowed by difficulties encountered in plant regeneration and in the insusceptibility of monocots to Agrobacterium mediated transformation. Most of the progress that has been made in the transformation of cereals has been in producing transgenic rice and maize. The progress in wheat has been hampered by the inability to establish suitable techniques for the regeneration of fertile plants following transformation.
There are a number of published reports of transient expression of foreign genes in wheat. However, the only report of stably transformed wheat plants involves a labor intensive method which yields transformants at a low frequency.
Thus, there is a need for biotechnological methods for the development of high-yield, high-nutritional, and disease-resistant wheat varieties. Such methods are necessary to complement the traditional breeding methods currently in use.